Springing into life

At last, after the barreness of winter, some of the plants in the garden are starting to poke their heads throught the soil and new leaves are starting to grow on stems.

Hydrangea starting to sprout its leaves

Normally, our garden doesn't get too bare in the winter, as living here, on the Wirral Peninsula, we have our own little micro-climate that usually prevents us from getting really cold winter weather. This usually means that there can be roses on the climbing rose and big green, fleshy leaves on the lilies, even at Christmas. However, with the heavy snow that we had before last year's Christmas, everything was knocked back into the ground. Lots of gardens have lost their cordylines, which are popular plants in the gardens around here, though I think ours have managed to survive.

Narcissa, with a grape hyacinth just popping through.

So it's lovely seeing the yellow heads of narcissa dancing in the breeze and the purple of the crocuses. Even are lilies are now thinking of poking their heads through the soil.

These crocuses in the wall basket on the back gate, are new ones that I put in last year. I love the dark royal purple against the yellow.

I actually think that the cold weather has actually done some good to the bulbs as we have far more popping up this year than we did last year. These streaky purple crocuses above, made a very poor showing last year, but they've popped up all over the place this year. Hopefully this is a good sign for the look of the garden for the rest of the year. All we need now is some warmer, or at least brighter, weather rather than the grey cloud. Here's hoping for a good summer, anyway.

TTFN
Louise